An alleged screen capture of the ATI version of Rydermark (saved and reposted to preserve metadata)

An alleged screen capture of the NVIDIA version of Rydermark (saved and reposted to preserve metadata)

A difference map of the two images

"Rydermark developers" make bold claims which turn out to be nothing more than a Photoshop hoax

It would appear The Inquirer was quick to jump the gun on a story accusing NVIDIA of lying about full DirectX 9 support.
The story accused NVIDIA of not allowing developers to use
24-bit or 32-bit shader precision. Instead it claims NVIDIA forces
developers into using 16-bit shader precision as the technique is faster. This is a
problem as DirectX 9 compliancy requires 24-bit shader precision or
better. "Rydermark" is not a commercially shipping application yet, and has had very little information published to confirm its authenticity.

It turns out the images "proving" NVIDIA’s
wrongdoings were nothing more than poorly done Photoshopped images. The
NVIDIA rendered image appeared to have blurrier water while the ATI
rendered image had sharper water detail. However, the
ATI rendered image just didn’t look right with poor cut offs and a
creation date three minutes after the NVIDIA rendered image. A difference image of the two JPG files can be seen to the right, with the outline of the modified area clearly visible in the ATI image. This would suggest the NVIDIA image was the original source image, and that the ATI version was modified afterwards.

A difference of the metadata from both images reveals that the NativeDigest delimiter is identical for both images, but has two different InstanceIDs. This would be consistent with an image that was modified and saved twice. In the author's defense, images that are created and saved on his computer have distinct metadata tags that are very easily identifiable. These are not present in the two images supplied by The Inquirer for "Rydermark" -- suggesting the images may not have been modified by the author.

Wrong. You are confusing pixel shaders with multitexturing. Pixel shaders are small programs that modify pixel data. The output can then be used as a texture, but there is no reason why pixel shaders can't run on 2D screen space (Windows Vista does this a lot, for example, and so do modern video editing and compositing programs).

In fact, most Photoshop filters and brushes can be implemented as pixel shaders (the reason why they're not is that different graphics cards produce slightly different results, and professional software needs to be consistent).

And no, I don't work for the Inquirer or any other news site or hardware manufacturer. Maybe that's why I don't have to worry about posting hollow "articles" to defend my sponsors.